Over the past several weeks, the jquery-ujs rails.js file has seen significant development and has now been entirely refactored. This new version leaves the closure approach behind in favor of an object literal style implementation. You now have access to a $.rails object and you are able to dynamically replace any value or method.

Mike Perham has released a new Ruby library which focuses on performing asynchronous tasks. Unlike delayed_job, girl_friday runs inside of the same process as your Rails application, alleviating the need to execute multiple external application instances. It also integrates with 3rd party error tracking services and provides hooks for callbacks and monitoring.

Terry Heath recently posted some modifications he's made to delayed_job to make it follow a Redis-like approach and spin up workers by forking within a single process. The aim here, again, is to reduce the memory footprint and spin up time for asynchronous job workers.

Pry is a Rubygem written by John Mair which provides a much more powerful IRB-like interactive Ruby console. It's based on SLIME (the Superior Lisp Interaction Mode for Emacs). It allows for in console source code browsing, code traversal, debugging, and real-time monkey patching, not to mention direct access to documentation for both native Ruby and C-implemented methods.

Last week, Jeff Kreeftmeijer released another great tutorial on how to generate image diffs in Ruby. He even goes over how GitHub may have implemented some of their new image diff functions. He covers pixel comparison, generating bounding boxes, Delta E calculations, and difference blends.

Just because we'd be remiss to entirely overlook it, Amazon's US-EAST-1 region EC2 instances more-or-less went dark at the end of last week. You probably noticed, since, well... a good bit of the Internet was affected, including Ruby5. So, "it turns out the cloud is actually just some place in Virginia." That is all.

Another exciting episode! Build your own cloud! The merits of headless Capybara and exposing your own metrics. Will Dirty keep your cucumber green? Will resque_scheduler work on Heroku? DHH strikes again - with CoffeeScript!?! Stay tuned and find out!